How Dollar General Is Secretly Robbing Its Customers

How Dollar General Is Secretly Robbing Its Customers

I’ve begun to really see Dollar General is like a criminal organization. You’re stealing from my community, and I think they’re very aware of it. It’s a classic bait and switch. Go for a drive in any American county, and you’ll likely soon pass by the yellow and black lettering of a Dollar General. With nearly $20,000 general stores in 48 states, the Tennessee based discount chain has sunk its teeth into lower income rural and suburban areas everywhere. Underneath Dollar General’s so-called low everyday prices in convenient locations lies a sinister business model and a massive scandal that hardly anybody knows about. My name is Lorie Hartline. I am a Dollar General shopper out of convenience in my neighborhood. The price of my kitty litter was $8.95. Well, one day, wait a minute, $10. I asked him about it. Oh, no. They’ve raised the price. Well, that doesn’t say it on the shelf. Well, they just have to change it. It’s It’s in the computer. It’s not on the shelf. Next week, go in and buy cat litter. Same thing. That is not what the price says on the shelf. What am I doing wrong here? I was watching the news one morning and heard about Dollar General in the state of Ohio was being sued for deceptive pricing. That is what happens to me. Lorie’s story was brought to attorney Mark Dan where it became the basis for one of three class action lawsuits in Oklahoma, New York, and New Jersey. I don’t think there’s any question that Dollar General is doing this intentionally and systematically. If you tell me one thing and then charge me something else, in almost every jurisdiction in America, that would be theft by deception. So, we have the poorest people in the country going to a store that’s deceiving them about the price that they’re charging for goods um in in a situation where they have very few other realistic choices. I think it’s about as exploitive a business plan uh as I’ve ever seen. Price verification is when we see that a product is listed for $2.99, take it up to the register, scan it, make sure it’s ringing up as $2.99. Unfortunately, in Dollar General’s case, the scale or the concern was over 80% of the stores that we checked were failing and failing repetitively. Dollar General has been fined over $20 million by states and the federal government since 2017. But those fines, which pale in comparison to the amount Dollar General has siphoned from communities, have done little to change the company’s behavior. There are literally millions of transactions a day. And even if at 10% of the time they’re stealing 10 cents on 10% of the items that are sold, uh we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars going into the pockets of of Dollar General shareholders and out of the pockets of the poorest people in America.

Dollar General is stealing from their customers.

They put one price on items and charge another—higher—price at the register.

It’s a major scam that’s siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars from the poorest people in America.